Facebook Pays $19 billion for WhatsApp – Math & Business

Facebook Inc. Paying US$19 billion for WhatsApp

WhatsApp is a messaging application that allows users of various phone interfaces (Android, iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) to message each other via their data plans without having to use up their text messages, among other features.

A month ago, @WhatsApp tweeted that “On Dec 31st our users sent 18B msgs and received 36B = 54 Billion total messages in a day”, an outstanding number.

Subjects you can easily integrate this into:

Business

Talk about how the selling price of WhatsApp compares to that of YouTube? What differences exist and why?

What skills did this entrepreneur/team of entrepreneurs need in order to build such a project?

Math

If the owner of WhatsApp took the money made from selling the application and invested it into a bank savings account with a rate of return of 1% compounded annually, how much will they make if left untouched for ten years?

Find statistics on how fast people started downloading WhatsApp and graph the data – is it linear, quadratic, exponential or other? Is this what you would expect?